1910

From PhalkeFactory

Differences with Seth Purushottamdas about the running of the press.

Nadia was born Mary Evans. Her mother was Greek and her father Welsh. Her professional career started as a stenotypist.

T. Mudaliar, car import under Ronnerdan Company.

Letters to the TOI

- the Indian anarchists

- The Chitpavan Brahmans

- Transvaal Indians

- Indian textbooks


Rabindranath Tagore publishes Geetanjali. The All-India Hindu Mahasabha is lauched at Allahabad, allegedly in response to the Muslim League, intensifying communal hostilites in Indian politics.

Dadasaheb Phalke attends a screening of Life of Christ at P.B.Mehta's America-India Cinema.



Publication of Valentin Chirol's Indian Unrest

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16444/16444-8.txt

1910 in phalke's journey same as 1909 in phalke's journey

"That in India the British Government has found the centres of active disaffection located in the Maratha country and in Lower Bengal, is a phenomenon which can be to a large extent accounted for by reference to Anglo-Indian history. The fact that Poona is one focus of sedition has been attributed in this volume to the survival among the Maratha Brahmins of the recollection that "far into the eighteenth century Poona was the capital of a theocratic State in which behind the Throne of the Peshwas both spiritual and secular authority were concentrated in the hands of the Brahmins." The Peshwas, as their title implies, had been hereditary Ministers who governed in the name of the reigning dynasty founded by the famous Maratha leader Sivajee, whose successors they set aside. But before the end of the eighteenth century the secular authority of the Peshwas had become almost nominal, and the real power in the State had passed into the grasp of a confederation of chiefs of predatory armies, whose violence drove the last Peshwa, more than a century ago, to seek refuge in a British camp. The political sovereignty of the Brahmins had disappeared from the time when he placed himself under British protection; and the Maratha chiefs (who were not Brahmins) only acknowledged our supremacy after some fiercely contested battles; with the result that they were confined to and confirmed in the possession of the territories now governed by their descendants. But it is quite true that to the memory of a time when for once, and once only, in Indian history, their caste established a great secular dominion, may be ascribed the tendency to disloyalty among the Maratha Brahmins."

..and the various indications of a desire to reform and purify their ancient religion may be partly due to the perception among educated Hindus that so contradictory a position is ultimately untenable, that the incongruity between sacrifices to the goddess Kali and high University degrees is too manifest.


Ignorance is unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural that in the last century certain philosophers should have assumed education to be the certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen like Macaulay should have declared education to be the best and surest remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case it was the clear and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt the intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of British rule. We have since discovered, by experience, that, although education is a sovereign remedy for many ills--is indeed indispensable to healthy progress--yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration of this potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the frame of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains, stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of which the disappointment is bitterly resented.

...It is now seen that our Western ideas and inventions, moral and material, are being turned against us by some of those to whom we have imparted an elementary aptitude for using them. And thus we have the strange spectacle, in certain parts of India, of a party capable of resorting to methods that are both reactionary and revolutionary, of men who offer prayers and sacrifices to ferocious divinities and denounce the Government by seditious journalism, preaching primitive superstition in the very modern form of leading articles. The mixture of religion with politics has always produced a highly explosive compound, especially in Asia.


From the Introduction by Alfred Lyall


semi educated proletariate

promoters of disaffection

as the remarkable rise in prices during the last decade. This has seriously enhanced the cost of living in India and has specially affected the very classes amongst whom disaffection is most widespread. The clerk, the teacher, the petty Government official, whose exiguous salaries have remained the same, find themselves to-day relatively, and in many cases actually, worse off than the artisan or even the labourer, whose wages have in many cases risen in proportion to the increased cost of living. Plague, which in the course of the last 14 years has carried off over 6,000,000 people, and two terrible visitations of famine have caused in different parts of the country untold misery and consequent bitterness. On the other hand, the growth of commerce and industry and the growing interest taken by all classes in commercial and industrial questions have led to a corresponding resentment of the fiscal restraints placed upon India by the Imperial Government for the selfish benefit, as it is contended, of the British manufacturer and trader. Much bad blood has undoubtedly been created by the treatment of British Indians in South Africa and the attitude adopted in British Colonies generally towards Asiatic immigrants.

... large influx of a lower class of Europeans which the development of railways and telegraphs and other industries requiring technical knowledge have brought in their train. Nor can it be denied that the growing pressure of office work as well as the increased facilities of home leave and frequent transfers from one post to another have inevitably to some extent lessened the contact between the Anglo-Indian official and the native population.

... Based upon caste, the most rigid of all social classifications, Hinduism has secured for some 3,000 years or more to the higher castes, and especially to the Brahmans, the highest of all castes, a social supremacy for which there is no parallel elsewhere. At the same time, inflexibly as they have dominated Hinduism, these higher castes have themselves preserved a flexibility of mind and temper which has enabled them to adapt themselves with singular success to the vicissitudes of changing times without any substantial sacrifice of their inherited traditions and aspirations. Thus it is amongst high-caste Hindus that for the last three-quarters of a century English education has chiefly spread, and, indeed, been most eagerly welcomed; it is amongst them that British administration has recruited the great majority of its native servants in every branch of the public service; it is amongst them also that are chiefly recruited the liberal professions, the Press, the schoolmasters--in fact all those agencies through which public opinion and the mind of the rising generation are most easily moulded and directed. That it is amongst them also that the spirit of revolt against British ascendency is chiefly and almost exclusively rife constitutes the most ominous feature of Indian unrest.

... Hence the desire on both sides to find some common denominator in a nebulous formula which each can interpret as to time and manner according to its own desires and aims. That formula seems to have been discovered in the term _Swaraj_, or self-rule, which, when euphemistically translated into Colonial self-government for India, offers the additional advantage of presenting the political aspirations of Indian "Nationalism" in the form least likely to alarm Englishmen, especially those who do not care or wish to look below the surface and whose sympathies are readily won by any catchword that appeals to sentimental Liberalism.

.... But if there were already, more than 20 years ago, wild and irreconcilable spirits bent on fomenting disaffection, there were amongst the Deccanee Brahmans themselves a small intellectual _élite_ who, though by no means servile apologists of British rule, fully realized that their primary duty was not to stir up popular passion against alien rulers, but to bring Hindu society into closer communion with the higher civilization which those rulers, whatever their shortcomings, undoubtedly represented. Conspicuous amongst such men was Mahadev Govind Ranade. Equally conspicuous in the opposite camp was a man of a very different stamp, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who was destined to become one of the most dangerous pioneers of disaffection. It was a Hindu gentleman and a Brahman who told me that if I wanted to study the psychology of Indian unrest I should begin by studying Tilak's career. "Tilak's onslaught in Poona upon Ranade, his alliance with the bigots of orthodoxy, his appeals to popular superstition in the new Ganpati celebrations, to racial fanaticism in the 'Anti-Cow-killing Movement,' to Mahratta sentiment in the cult which he introduced of Shivaji, his active propaganda amongst schoolboys and students, his gymnastic societies, his preaching in favour of physical training, and last but not least his control of the Press and the note of personal violence which he imparted to newspaper polemics, represent the progressive stages of a highly-organized campaign which has served as a model to the apostles of unrest all over India." This was a valuable piece of advice, for, if any one can claim to be truly the father of Indian unrest, it is Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The story of his initial campaign in the Deccan, though it dates back to the closing decades of the last century, is still well worth studying, and has, in fact, never received adequate attention, for on the one hand it pricks the shallow view that Indian unrest is merely an echo of the Japanese victories in Manchuria, and, on the other hand, it illustrates clearly the close connexion that exists between the forces of Indian political disaffection and those of social and religious reaction, whilst the methods which he employed and the results which attended his activity have been reproduced with singular fidelity in subsequent phases of the movement.